Transcription
Dr. Rhonda Patrick, I am fascinated by so many of the things that you talked about and they're front of mind for me at the moment because I'm a 33-year-old man. And I know from doing this podcast and looking at graphs like this one, which we'll talk about today, which I don't think most people have ever seen in their lives, that this is the age where things might start changing direction from here on over the next decade. And there's things I can do to set myself up now if I listen to your advice for the remaining decades of my life to be remarkably different. I'm playing with this in my hands at the moment. It's for anyone that can't see, you should probably look at the screen right now. It's a yellow blob of squidgy, slightly disgusting material. What is this and why does this matter?
>> So, this represents visceral fat. It's something that most people haven't heard of. Many people have heard of fat. They know fat is bad, but they don't realize there are different kinds of fat.
>> There is visceral fat. And this is the kind of fat that you can't really pinch at adipose tissue kind of fat, right? I mean, if you opened up your body, you could pinch it because it's deep, deep within your body. It's often referred to as belly fat.
>> And it's, it's surrounding your organs like your liver, your kidney, you know, your intestines. This is a very deep belly fat and it's very different from subcutaneous fat. You can actually be lean but have a high amount of visceral fat. We call these metabolically unhealthy people. So visceral fat, you mentioned you're 33. The average 33-year-old male has how much visceral fat?
>> According to the data, it says roughly 1.2 pounds at the age of 30. And then for a woman, .5 lb of visceral fat at the age of 30. At 40, it's 1.7 lb for a man and .7 for a woman. At 50, 2.2 lb for a man, one pound for a woman, and at 60, 2.7 lb of visceral fat and 1.54 lb for a woman, which is the highest risk for metabolic syndromes at that age. But I mean, all of them are pretty scary.
>> It is. And as you notice, the trend is as you get older, you have a higher risk of having more of it. 70% of women over the age of 50 have a high amount of visceral fat. 50% of men over the age of 50 have a high amount of visceral fat. This visceral fat, for one, it's going to double your risk of early mortality. Full stop. That's, that's, you know, it's, it's going to double your risk. Double your risk.
>> Double, double. Visceral fat is, as I mentioned, different from the other kind of fat, the subcutaneous kind of fat, the adipose tissue kind of fat.
>> In several ways. One is that it is metabolically active. It is secreting inflammatory cytokines. These are, you know, molecules that are signaling to the immune system, but they're also involved with damaging our cells. And for this reason, people with a high amount of visceral fat are 44% more likely to get metastatic cancer. That's cancer that's going to metastasize. Very dangerous types of cancer. They're also more likely, you mentioned metabolic syndrome. This is a big, big thing with visceral fat. This type of fat is constantly breaking down triglycerides into free fatty acids. It's constantly doing it.
>> What's triglycerides?
>> Triglycerides are how your body is able to store fatty acids and fat and use them for later, you know, energy, right? So, they're constantly breaking them down and using them. They're using these these fatty acids. But typically what happens in your body when you eat a meal, you have your glucose levels go up, right? Your blood sugar elevates, your glucose levels go up and that signals to the pancreas in your body to make insulin. Insulin is this hormone that plays a role in many things. One of it is to tell different parts of the body to take glucose up like your liver, your muscle, your adipose tissue. Well, the problem is is this visceral fat is constantly making those free fatty acids. And so those fatty acids, it doesn't, it doesn't respond. This, we call it, it's not really an organ, but this type of fat doesn't respond to insulin. So whereas the subcutaneous fat will stop breaking down fat and using fat as energy. It says, "Okay, look, I have energy here. I got to do something with this energy. Let me, let me store it for later use." Right? Well, that, that doesn't happen with visceral fat. What happens is it just keeps going, keeps going, keeps going. What happens is when your visceral fat is metabolically active like that, it is basically making it where insulin can't work its job. And so what happens is that glucose can't go into your liver. It stays in your blood system.
>> And you really want it to be stored in your liver, right?
>> You want it to be stored in your liver as glycogen to be used as energy when you're fasting or when you're, you know, physically active or when whenever you need it, right? Also in your muscle. Same thing, stored as glycogen or stored in your adipose tissue. Um, and so, and so none of that happens because insulin, it's not able to to basically act on your, your, your organs. It's, there's no signal. So no one's getting the phone call, "Hey, time to take the glucose up." It's not happening, right? So the glucose sits around. So what happens is your body freaks out because it's not good to have glucose sitting around in your bloodstream for a while. It causes a lot of damage, right?
>> Mhm.
>> And so what happens is your body makes even more insulin to try to overcompensate. Your body goes, "Oh, maybe that wasn't enough insulin because, you know, the glucose isn't coming in to the organs like the liver like it's supposed to, so let me put some more out."
>> And for anyone that doesn't know, insulin is kind of like the taxi driver that goes and picks up the glucose and takes it home.
>> Exactly. It's taking it home. It's taking it back to the liver. And so what happens when you make more insulin, you're overcompensating in such a way that now glucose really does get taken up into these other organs like the liver. And it, so much so that it causes your blood glucose levels to go down and and you're crashing. And all of a sudden, this is responsible for that, you know, people that eat a meal and they're kind of insulin resistant. They eat a meal and then all of a sudden they're crashing an hour later. We're like, "Why am I, why do I have no energy? Why am I hungry?" Right? Because when you're after you crash, your blood glucose levels go down. That's what I mean by crashing. Um, really far down. Not, not normal levels, but like below that. And so then your body tries to overcompensate by going, "Oh, I'm hungry. I need to eat." And so you start to have these cravings for like energy-dense foods. And that's part of this cycle of the beginnings of insulin resistance. And so when I'm talking about here with visceral fat, it causes insulin resistance. And that's essentially the take-home here by, by it's constantly metabolizing fatty acids, it's, it's stopping that taxi car from going and getting the glucose. It's, it's not happening. It's not responding. You're not picking up the driver, right? And so you become insulin resistant. And that has a lot of problems. One, it's going to affect your immediate energy levels. It's going to affect the way you're feeling. And two, it's going to make you more likely to become type two diabetic because eventually your body will won't be able to produce enough insulin to bring the glucose in. And so then you become type 2 diabetic. So that is a big consequence of having this visceral fat in addition to those inflammatory molecules that are being generated from this fat. It's just so metabolically active. And that inflammation that you're generating not only does things like raise your cancer risk by 44%. It also makes you tired. It gives you brain fog, lethargy. When your immune system is being activated by this inflammation, you're taking energy away from your brain. It, it's a lot of energy to activate your immune system. And so, yeah. So, that energy is now going to the wrong place. It's not going to your brain.
>> So, you can feel, you won't feel cognitively as sharp.
>> Absolutely. Won't just think about when you're, when you're, when you have an infection. Your immune system is very active. You're fighting off a pathogen, right? Do you feel like you're tired or do you feel like you're cognitively at your peak?
>> Uh, yeah, I'm like, I'm out of action for several days usually.
>> Right? You're tired and your brain isn't working. And part of that reason is because your activation of your immune system is sucking energy away from your brain. And the other reason is because the inflammation being generated gets into the brain and disrupts neurotransmitters and things like that. So you're, it's like a double whammy. You're not, your brain isn't working properly. And so there's a lot of people walking around constantly feeling tired, feeling lethargic, feeling brain fog, and they might have a high amount of visceral fat and not even know it. So typically.
>> Looking at the data, I mean, most people have too much visceral fat.
>> Most people do have too much visceral fat. And typically a really high amount is, I would say a proxy for it would be measuring your waist circumference. So, like if women have a waist circumference of 35 inches or greater, that is a sign of too much visceral fat. If men have a waist circumference of 40 inches or more, that is a sign of too much visceral fat. Ideally, you would go and get what's called a DEXA scan. Now, this is not something that's routinely done, and it doesn't necessarily have to be done unless you're that person that really likes to go the extra mile and directly measure things. That would be another way to do it. You really want to have below 300, you know, grams of visceral fat. Ideally closer to zero the better.
>> Me and my friend went and got a DEXA scan done and the remarkable thing is I weigh a lot more than him and I'm much bigger than him. He's skinny but after the DEXA scan they said that he had too much visceral fat which I, I thought vis, I thought you must be like big or obese to have visceral fat but he's a skinny guy and the DEXA scan said too much visceral fat.
>> Yes, that's the thing. You know, I was involved in clinical research for many years when I was doing my post-graduate training. And we were looking at populations of people that were metabolically unhealthy or maybe overweight, obese in some cases, and you would have someone come in that they looked skinny, they looked like they were metabolically healthy because they weren't overweight. And yet all of their biomarker data was showing the opposite. Like they looked on paper, if you were to show me their metabolic data, I would go, "Oh, this is an overweight obese person." So these are these are lean but metabolically unhealthy people and a large percentage of that has to do with an increase in visceral fat. You won't even necessarily know that you're getting higher amounts of visceral fat. It's not necessarily going to be reflected on the scale. You know, you mentioned maybe a pound, maybe a little bit more. That's like daily fluctuation in some cases, right? Like, I mean, I don't know about you, but like I, I can fluctuate a pound from day to day for sure. If you're talking about 500 grams or less, that's not going to be, you know, reflected on a scale either. You might be going, well, what, why visceral fat? What's causing visceral fat? You know, I mentioned age, that's a big one. Hormones is a big one. Women are very susceptible as they go through perimenopause and menopause because estrogen actually tells, helps tell the body how to store energy and it tells it to store energy and fat in adipose tissue, not viscerally. So when your estrogen starts to go down during perimenopause and then menopause, women really start to gain a lot of this belly fat. They gain a lot of the visceral fat. Testosterone also, it doesn't tell the body how to store the fat so much. It helps you burn visceral fat. So men are a little bit more protected when they're younger as well, but as they age, of course, testosterone goes down as well, and that affects the visceral fat. But mostly, it's our diet and our lifestyle that's really affecting visceral fat. It's kind of mind-blowing how quickly you can gain visceral fat. Like there was sleep is a big one. When you're, when you miss sleep, that is something that can really, you can start to store, you can start to gain visceral fat very quickly. Um, there was a study in healthy young men. These men were sleep-restricted. Typically when sleep restriction studies are done, you're, you're looking at four hours of sleep per night. So pretty severe. Not out of the ordinary. I did many of those college graduate school deadlines. Definitely as a new parent, I mean, it's unfortunately drags on for months. So these men were only sleeping four hours a night for two weeks. Okay, these are healthy young men, college-age students. Okay, young. They gained 11% visceral fat after that two weeks, but not a pound on the scale, but they had 11% higher visceral fat after just, you know, two weeks of not getting enough sleep.
>> And they weighed the same?
>> Pretty much. So, it was the composition of their body that's shifting.
>> Yes. Also, the visceral fat, like, like I said, you're not gaining pounds and pounds and pounds of it necessarily. You know, you're gaining grams and grams, but like, it's happening and and any amount that you're starting to gain is unhealthy, right? It's going to start causing insulin resistance. It's going to start, you know, causing fatty liver. That's another thing. It does it because it's around the liver. It basically the liver doesn't know what to do with all the fat. So, it starts to make and store it around the fat. And so you start to get this non-alcoholic fatty liver, which is happening now in like young people. So sleep is one. Another major, major, I would say lever for gaining visceral fat is your diet quality and quantity. So if you start to be in a caloric excess constantly, you can start to gain visceral fat and that's also been shown in studies. So, there was a recent study that again was in healthy young men given about 1,200 extra calories a day and it was mostly from ultra-processed foods, right? I mean, they're 1,200 calories, so like a Big Mac and a Coke, Big Mac and fries, whatever, you know? So, you're, you're talking about almost like an extra meal a day and from processed foods, ultra-processed foods. For five days, they were given, you know, this extra caloric intake. After that five days, they started to gain visceral fat. They started to have signs of fatty liver after five days. And their brains became insulin resistant. And this is important. Yes.
>> You, how many calories were they having in excess?
>> 1,200 to 1,500.
>> In excess?
>> More than what they were usually going to eat. Yes. Okay.
>> Yes. So, you know, it's a lot of people are eating caloric excess, you know, daily. They're not, they're not exercising and there's no energy expenditure and they're eating more and so they're in, you know, 1,200. Now, this is the extreme end, right? I'm giving you an extreme end because that's what they do usually in in studies like this because they want to get a significant result. But after five days, they, they were gaining visceral fat, their brains became insulin resistant. So insulin is also very important for the brain. The brain is telling the body how to store the fat and how to store energy. And when the, and when insulin is not able to to get into the brain and have its action, then you start to not have the brain tell the body how to store this energy and it ends up storing it viscerally. It's like this default.
>> Do you know, putting those two things together, the thing I've noticed that impacts my performance the most as it relates to articulation, cognitive performance, my ability to think is those two things coming together. It's when I, I eat late.
>> Close. It's when I eat close to sleep. If I do that a couple of nights in a row, I feel like my brain no longer works.
>> Yes. Yeah. You know, obviously we all have to like live our lives and there's social things and it's fun to go out and have a dinner with your friends or an event, right? But it's not a good idea to eat a meal, a big meal three hours before, fewer than three hours before bed. So, you want to stop eating three hours before bed. And three is really the magic number in multiple studies because when you eat a meal, it is activating your sympathetic nervous system, right? That's the fight or flight response. That's not what you want active when you're about to go to bed. When you're activating the sympathetic nervous system right before you're going to bed, let's say you eat a meal within an hour of bedtime, you're digesting all that. It's your sympathetic nervous system is active. And even if you're sleeping, it's not good sleep. It's fragmented sleep. And so it's disrupted sleep because you, you need to be in that parasympathetic part of, you know, the nervous system. That dominance needs to be parasympathetic, which is the rest, restore. It's called rest and digest. But I don't like digest because actually digesting is what activates the sympathetic nervous system. So it's like the recovery, right?
>> So should I stay up then for three hours? If I, if I eat at midnight,
>> Should I stay up till 3:00 a.m.?
>> No. No. You should just go to bed, but don't do it on a daily basis, right? I mean, the, the key is the habit, you know, the habit. And so, if you need to eat something before bed, you should do something that's light. Maybe a protein shake with some almond milk, you know, something that's not super heavy.
>> I've heard you talk about fiber.
>> Resistant starch does, interestingly, seem to help improve sleep. And so, you know, maybe some rice or a potato.
>> A little bit of rice or a potato.
>> Some fries or something.
>> Maybe not a fried potato, baked baked potato and then cool it because then it's resistant starch, right? Because then it's good for your gut microbiome.
>> Why?
>> It changes the composition of the fiber.
>> And, and you can cook it, let it cool, and then heat it again if you like to eat it heated. As long as it went through a cooling part.
>> Wow.
>> And then you can eat it. But that's resistant starch. Resistant starch is also in green bananas. Very beneficial for the gut and also for, interestingly, for improving sleep. The things that are really moving the needle to to make you gain visceral fat are being basically being in a caloric excess, especially from refined high-fat, high-sugar foods. And then not getting enough sleep, move the needle. Chronic stress is an amplifier of it. So if you're constantly having cortisol that's kind of stopping the body from storing energy right the right way and it's going viscerally as well. I would say that amplifies, especially if it's like in the context of being in a caloric excess and not exercising. Alcohol is another one. If you drink, if you're excessively consuming alcohol, you're going to store a lot of the energy that you're also consuming is going to be stored viscerally. I mean, you've seen the beer belly, right? I mean, that's like a thing. It's visceral fat. It's, it's not beer, it's visceral fat. So alcohol is another one. In terms of losing visceral fat, I mean, the good news is is that you can lose it quite easily and quite rapidly.
>> I was going to say parents have a hard time because you're naming those things about like sleep and stress and and I was thinking, gosh, parents have like a, have it coming from them from all sides.
>> They do. Um, the, but see, this is where the good news comes in because, you know, part of the reason why sleep is causing you to gain more visceral, sleep loss is causing you to gain visceral fat is because it's causing your body to become insulin resistant. It's like this vicious cycle. Visceral fat causes insulin resistance. Insulin resistance causes more visceral fat.
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